As a metaphor for springtime, nothing compares to the butterfly taking off on a flower-scented breeze. For everyone who's felt like a caterpillar in a cocoon these last months, the release of thousands of butterflies promises to be a high point at the Earth Day celebration in Berkeley this Saturday, April 25.

Students at several area elementary and middle schools have been nurturing about 2,000 chrysalises for almost a month, and will release their butterflies at noon, just after the parade, at the beginning of ceremonies at Martin Luther King Jr. Park.

"The mayor feels that this is an amazing learning tool for children all over the Bay Area and she's delighted to take part in it," says Tamlyn Bright, Mayor Shirley Dean's neighborhoods liaison.

During the release, Earth First activist Julia Butterfly, who says her life was transformed by an encounter with a butterfly, will address the crowd long-distance from the 200-foot-high Humboldt County old-growth redwood tree she has resided in for the past four months.

Beyond the obvious springtime symbolism, butterflies have long been a metaphor for expanding environmental consciousness. During the transformation inside the cocoon, the caterpillar's body at first rejects the emerging new butterfly cells, fighting them off as an immune system threat. But eventually they take over, replacing a pudgy worm with a beautiful creature that flies. Those who
incorporate the butterfly into peace activities and events fancy that humanity could undergo a similar transformation -- one "cell," or awakened person, at a time -- until the old society and consciousness is overwhelmed by the new.

The Mayor and City Council have declared April 22-30 Butterfly Berkeley Week and have adopted an Earth Proclamation, which expresses the hope that the year 2000 will be the turning point for "a better world based on equality, justice and a sustainable planet." In addition, Mayor Dean will attend a special butterfly release by over 250 students at the Willard School on Thursday, April 30.

Alan Moore, head of the Butterfly Gardeners' Association, a Berkeley-based group that has sponsored such events throughout the Bay Area, wants the butterfly to become the leading symbol for millennium activities. He has joined with many peace, environmental, and social justice groups to make butterfly gardening and launching a part of their events, and has worked to
bring the practice into women's shelters, homes for seniors, and prisons.

In the last few years, Moore has urged President Clinton to start a butterfly garden on White House grounds, met Pete Seeger at last summer's World Peace Festival in Armenia, New York, and launched butterflies at several events commemorating the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Moore, 52, says he has lived on a shoestring for over a year. He came to the West Coast for a series of environmental conferences and in January, decided to stay.

"In the six weeks I was in California I just fell in love with it."

On February 9 he was sworn in to the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission, and has been staying at the Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship. "Ever since I got to California I've had people put me up in all the different cities I went to," he says.

Since he started this work, Moore says, he has spent untold thousands of dollars of his own money donating butterfly-farming kits, which cost $35-$50 for about a dozen caterpillars.

"Within a year, [butterfly farming] should be in every school in the area," he says. "I'd like to find a backer, because we've got programs for nonviolence that absolutely turn kids around in a day. There's just something about the delicacy of butterflies and the caring for them. Teachers have reported that when kids did these projects, they were cooperating like they never did
before, and fights were down."

Moore owned a landscaping business in Allentown, Pennsylvania four years ago when he first started organizing butterfly launches. "Basically, the idea just flooded into me," he says. "It took on a life of its own." But after four years, his business was faltering and he wasn't making any money.

Last year, his wife gave him an ultimatum: "If I didn't make any money by my birthday she was going to leave me."

She left him.

"And then six days later the United Nations invited me to do the opening ceremony for the Earth Summit," Moore says.

"I hate deadlines."

Which is too bad, because Moore says he's writing a book.